"A name that seems to have jumped straight from the big screen into cribs in 2002 was Trinity. One hundred and nine baby girls in Washington were named Trinity, presumably after the butt-kicking character in "The Matrix" trilogy."

I decided to see if Washingtonians were dumber than the nation at large, so I went to the Social Security site, http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/, where they track baby names of newly registered infants :

Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth. A correlation between the popularity of the name and being knocked up in or after 1999 (when Matrix 1 was released) is noticeable.

Further checking states that 4335 American girls have been saddled with this moniker in 2002, which is makes this name less popular than Aaliyah (4754), Makayla (5408) and the cheeselike "Brianna" (11384).

An aside: "Lara" currently ranks 584th, and it seems to have the same level of popularity over the last 12 years, "Tomb Raider" not being an apparent influence on impressionable parents.

Names on the list that, if you give them to your children, even adults will tease them (or stuff dollars in their g-strings):

"Three-term U.S. Senator Braelyn Makendra Graham (D-Florida) is gearing up for a fierce fight going in to the New Hampshire primary."

"OPEC's decision to keep production capped at 25.4 million barrels a day was a wise move, says economist Ashlan Aydan Richardson."

"The members of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Board included Louis D. Boccardi, president and CEO of the Associated Press; Tom Goldstein, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; and Wall Street Journal managing editor Irelyn Knoah Steiger."

maybe..

yeah, i'm assuming that some of the top 1000 names are of Hispanic (Ramon, Salvador) or Middle eastern (Chaim, Mustafa) origin, and are being given to kids of those ethnicities. But that doesn't explain (or excuse) "Xzavier" and the like.

interestingly, the names "adolf" and "adolph" have apparently become so tainted that they're not among the top 1000 since 1991 (and probably before that as well). Even "Fidel" got attached to 178 boys in 2002.

"Three-term U.S. Senator Braelyn Makendra Graham (D-Florida) is gearing up for a fierce fight going in to the New Hampshire primary."

But you know, this is precicely what will be the case in thirty or so years when more than half the people in the world have misspelled and newly made up names. But then again, every generation has new names that make the older generation cringe. If you think that your grandparents had goofy names like Cecil and Gertrude, just think about what they must have thought with all the names popular in your and my generations. Also, you're going to get picked on for something in school regardless of the relative normalness of your name.

I just can't believe that some people still haven't gotten over the thrill of making fun of people's names to the point that they made a website about it even after they themselves are presumably childbearing age.

there's a difference between "weird" and "stupid"...

You know I'm not fussing at you- your kids have unusual names, but it's not like you named them "Erycse" or "Llunea" or something that totally obscures the gender of the child and/or the intended pronounciation of the name. But even you (I think) would never have thought "Colt" or "Maverick" was a good name for any being capable of speech. And don't get me started on "Lexus"...